Fetching
One moment.
Fetching
One moment.
Eleven books by a shoemaker of Görlitz who wrote, by his own account, because he could not help it. Ten of them stand here in the seventeenth-century English of John Sparrow, who translated Boehme within a generation of his death and whose prose is itself now four hundred years old; where that English has drifted out of reach, the facing pane carries a modern register — the same text with archaic inflection and spelling normalised by rule, never paraphrased. Nothing is reworded, and where no register appears beside a passage it is because the rules found nothing to change.
The eleventh book is not in English at all, and it is the reason this note exists.
Des trois principes de l'essence divine, printed at Paris in 1802, is the same work as Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence, which stands here as the second book — the same twenty-seven chapters in the same order, opening `Du premier principe de l'essence divine` against Sparrow's `Of the first Principle of the Divine Essence`. Its translator was Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who gave the last years of his life to putting Boehme into French, and who has a shelf of his own in this Lycaeum.
That makes a closed circuit inside this archive, and it is worth naming plainly. Saint-Martin translates Boehme. La Iniciación, printed in Montevideo a hundred and forty years later, traces its own descent through Saint-Martin. A reader can therefore follow one thread from a German mystic of 1619, through the French philosopher who carried him into another language, to a Spanish-language monthly of the 1940s that claimed them both — and read every step of it in the original.
The two are shelved as one work rather than two because that is what they are. They are not set as facing panes: an English translation of 1619 and a French translation of 1802 are two independent readings of a lost German original, and pairing them line by line would assert a correspondence neither translator ever claimed.
113. Therefore, now, the desiring is another thing than the willing, for the willing is without being [or substance], and the desiring maketh being; and so out of the eternal nothing is come whatsoever is: and before there was nothing, but only a willing, which was a virgin, without image, and yet was a figure of an image in the willing; and this figure hath discovered the spirit, and created it into a being [or substance], as we perceive in the form of this world: The figure hath caused the spirit, that it hath expressed the wonders in figure, and that is the matrix of the genetrix, and that is the spirit of this world: for the spirit could express nothing but a similitude of itself; for there was nothing else. 14. Therefore we demonstrate the creation to you thus; for to create signifieth to comprehend in the willing whatsoever standeth in the figure in the willing: for when a carpenter will build a house, he must first frame a model of it in his willing, how he will build it, and then he buildeth it according to the model of his willing.
215. Thus also hath the spirit of God framed in his will a model after his likeness, and so created that model; for you see in this world, that when the spirit through the word Fiat (upon the First Day) created the out-birth in the wrath, viz. water and earth, he comprehended the figure in the will; and that was the heaven which he created on the Second Day, and tried the work on the Third Day, and suffered to proceed out of the earth forms and images out of the essences, viz. trees, herbs, and grass, which were images of the essences of the desiring; but the image of the spirit remained still hidden, and yet was in being even unto the Fourth Day. (Here understand) a Day without the sun, is one turning about of the wheel of nature in the desiring of the willing. The inward will hath the number six, according to the six spirits, and the outward [will] in the desiring of the figure hath also the number six, according to the similitude of the spirit; and the two kingdoms [viz. the inward and the outward] make, with their number sixes, four-and-twenty, which divide themselves into four parts, viz. six before noon, and six after noon, six before mid-night, and six after mid-night, till the beginning or morning again.
316. And according to this, the spirit in the desiring did set a sign, and a reckoning, whence times and years proceed, which were not before; for every number [of the] twelve, which is heavenly, divine, and earthly, human or bestial, hath a sign in the firmament, which the spirit created into a visible being, together with the crown of the centre, which is the circumference [or sphere] of the constellations. And we give you notice, that the creating of the spirit, is a going forth out of itself into the outward. For in Loco Solis, in the place of the sun, is the point where the spirit created the similitude; for the word Fiat stood there, and went forth from the inward number ten as a body, and that is Luna, and in such a comprehension was the manner and form of the deep apprehended: and the spirit went forth, and drave the essences of the centre even to the crown, and there comprehended them with the signs [or framed them into the signs], and all forms of the image, which stood in the virgin in the figure in the willing, and they are the stars, and created them as a circumference [or sphere] of the spirit, and they are all together a body of that spirit, which is called Sol: for there the eternal spirit hath comprehended or conceived the similitude of the spirit [of this world] : and it goeth thus forth out of the natural body of this
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
113. Therefore, now, the desiring is another thing than the willing, for the willing is without being [or substance], and the desiring maketh being; and so out of the eternal nothing is come whatsoever is: and before there was nothing, but only a willing, which was a virgin, without image, and yet was a figure of an image in the willing; and this figure hath discovered the spirit, and created it into a being [or substance], as we perceive in the form of this world: The figure hath caused the spirit, that it hath expressed the wonders in figure, and that is the matrix of the genetrix, and that is the spirit of this world: for the spirit could express nothing but a similitude of itself; for there was nothing else. 14. Therefore we demonstrate the creation to you thus; for to create signifieth to comprehend in the willing whatsoever standeth in the figure in the willing: for when a carpenter will build a house, he must first frame a model of it in his willing, how he will build it, and then he buildeth it according to the model of his willing.
215. Thus also hath the spirit of God framed in his will a model after his likeness, and so created that model; for you see in this world, that when the spirit through the word Fiat (upon the First Day) created the out-birth in the wrath, viz. water and earth, he comprehended the figure in the will; and that was the heaven which he created on the Second Day, and tried the work on the Third Day, and suffered to proceed out of the earth forms and images out of the essences, viz. trees, herbs, and grass, which were images of the essences of the desiring; but the image of the spirit remained still hidden, and yet was in being even unto the Fourth Day. (Here understand) a Day without the sun, is one turning about of the wheel of nature in the desiring of the willing. The inward will hath the number six, according to the six spirits, and the outward [will] in the desiring of the figure hath also the number six, according to the similitude of the spirit; and the two kingdoms [viz. the inward and the outward] make, with their number sixes, four-and-twenty, which divide themselves into four parts, viz. six before noon, and six after noon, six before mid-night, and six after mid-night, till the beginning or morning again.
316. And according to this, the spirit in the desiring did set a sign, and a reckoning, whence times and years proceed, which were not before; for every number [of the] twelve, which is heavenly, divine, and earthly, human or bestial, hath a sign in the firmament, which the spirit created into a visible being, together with the crown of the centre, which is the circumference [or sphere] of the constellations. And we give you notice, that the creating of the spirit, is a going forth out of itself into the outward. For in Loco Solis, in the place of the sun, is the point where the spirit created the similitude; for the word Fiat stood there, and went forth from the inward number ten as a body, and that is Luna, and in such a comprehension was the manner and form of the deep apprehended: and the spirit went forth, and drave the essences of the centre even to the crown, and there comprehended them with the signs [or framed them into the signs], and all forms of the image, which stood in the virgin in the figure in the willing, and they are the stars, and created them as a circumference [or sphere] of the spirit, and they are all together a body of that spirit, which is called Sol: for there the eternal spirit hath comprehended or conceived the similitude of the spirit [of this world] : and it goeth thus forth out of the natural body of this
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
No commentary for this page.